Book Review: The Good Life by Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
Lessons From The World's Longest Study on Happiness
Title: The Good Life. And How to Live it. Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness
Author: Robert Waldinger, Marc Schulz
Year: 2023
In short
The key to a happy and healthy life is strong relationships.
Our inner experience, how we feel inside, is of greater importance to our well-being than what happens around us.
We can improve the quality of our life by how we respond to (challenging) events, using the WISER formula: watch, interpret, select, engage, reflect.
Summary
“Life, even when it's good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn't be good. Why? Because a rich life - a good life - is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.” p. 3
"Good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period." p. 10
The Harvard Study is about what Aristotle coined eudaimonia (Eudaimonia is well-being in the process): well-being, a life of meaning and purpose (not so much about hedonic which is about pleasures).
We are generally bad at knowing what makes us happy (affective forecasting), especially relationships. That’s due to the messiness of relationships and because we overestimate costs and underestimate benefits. Plus, society shapes us in our thinking about happiness:
Although ‘money does not make happy’ is out there as a popular warning, we still seem to value it highly in society as a source of happiness. In a 2010 study by Deaton and Kahnemann, a threshold income was identified above which more income did not add to happiness, while happiness did increase with more money for those below the income threshold.
Findings on a happiness set-point indicate that whatever happens to us, around us, is not as important for happiness as what is going on inside of us. Whatever happens to us in the outside world still is played out in terms of happiness inside of us:
“Not even lottery winners can remain euphoric forever. This does not point to a flaw in the human character, but to a biological fact: we meet all experiences, positive and negative, on the same psychological and neurological playing field in our brain. Here the science dovetails with a central tenet of Stoicism and Buddhism, as well as many other spiritual traditions: the way we feel in life is determined only in part by what happens around us, and to a great extent by what happens inside of us.” p. 50
The idea of human life cycles/stages has a long tradition going back to Aristotle but was also picked up by modern psychology and the Harvard Study. In each stage, different things become important to us, we ask different questions of life and us, and (the meaning of) our relationships change.
In middle age, generativity becomes more important:
“In psychology, expanding our concerns and efforts beyond our own lives is called "generativity" and it's a key to unlocking the vibrancy and excitement of midlife. Among Harvard Study participants, the happiest and most satisfied adults were those who managed to turn the question "What can I do for myself?" into "What can I do for the world beyond me?" John F. Kennedy - himself a Harvard Study participant - came to understand this well in his own midlife. He offered not just political, but emotional and developmental guidance when, as president, he said, famously, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." p. 75
Taking a step back now and then, and thinking broadly about where you are in life, as Harvard Study participants have done, helps. We gain an understanding of ourselves and our relationships. We perhaps see more meaning, and gratitude, and feel less frustrated about whatever is bothering us in the moment.
We are social beings. Loneliness is a real danger to our mental and physical well-being. Evolutionary we would have been in a state of alert whenever we were alone, helping us survive short-term but at the cost of our long-term well-being. This continues today.
The quality and frequency of our contact with people in our lives are the key predictors of our happiness. Ask yourself: how does a relationship make me feel (energizing or depleting) and how often that happens?
The keystones of relationships (with survey questions from the study):
Safety and Security
Who would you call if you woke up, scared in the middle of the night?
Who would you turn to in a moment of crisis?
Learning and growth
Who encourages you to try new things, to take chances, to pursue your life’s goals?
Emotional closeness and confiding
Who knows everything (or most things) about you?
Who can you call on when you’re feeling low and to be honest with them about how are you feeling?
Who can you ask for advice and trust what they say?
Identity affirmation and shared experience
Is there someone in your life who has shared many experiences with you, and to help strengthen your sense of who you are, and where you come from?
Romantic intimacy
Do you feel satisfied with the amount of romantic intimacy in your life?
Are you satisfied in your sexual relationships?
Help, both informational and practical
Who do you turn to if you need some expertise or help solving a practical problem?
Fun and relaxation
Who makes you laugh?
Who do you call to see a movie or go on a road trip?
Who makes you feel relaxed, connected, at ease?
Consider also how you lend the above types of support to others. Be generous. It comes around.
Be curious, deeply, about others. Lose yourself in the experience of another. Although listening is not always easy, it can be deeply meaningful: “One of our greatest joys (and this is not confined to therapy) comes in moments when we sense that we've understood the experience of another person and then communicated that understanding in a way that feels true to them. It's life-affirming to suddenly find oneself in sync with the experience of someone else. This is a crucial step in connecting with others through curiosity: communicating your new understanding back to them.” 115
Attention/Time is the most valuable thing we have. When we give attention, we give love - and in the process, we receive it as we feel more alive.
The wandering/distracted mind is connected to unhappiness.
Being present with others, and trying to empathize, is more important than actually being right about how others feel.
How to deal with challenges in life, moment to moment?
Emotions are complex but they have an ‘action tendency’, eg fear includes an urge to escape.
We all have coping styles. How do you react to a challenge - do you turn away from it or move toward it, tackle it?
The WISER model for reacting to emotionally challenging situations:
Watch
Press a pause button and be curious.
What is happening, is this typical, what happens next, what is a perspective I have not considered.
Interpret
Name why you have the emotions.
Why am I feeling this way? What’s important here? What’s so challenging for me about this?
Select
Create options and decide what your desired outcome is.
What’s possible here? How can I make it this way instead of that way? What don’t I want as outcome? What strengths can help me with it and what weaknesses can hurt me?
Engage:
Implementing with care
Being open to the unexpected or complex/messy relationships
Reflect
How did it go?
Did it make the situation better or worse?
What can I learn from this?
Attachment styles: how do we connect with others? Research by psychologist Mary Ainsworth in 1970 with babies who are introduced to a strange place with the caregiver absent: how do they respond when the caregiver returns?
Securely attached: responding positively to the return and allowing and able to be soothed by them.
Anxious: responding positively to the return but not being easily soothed
Detached: not responding to the return, perhaps even turning away - although they still needed soothing, they didn’t show it, perhaps because they learned they could not accept or expect that love.
Attachment styles are relevant for adults, too. How do we connect with people?
Touch from someone we love has a measurable impact, eg reducing our level of anxiety and our perception of pain in a medical procedure.
Empathy (curiosity and listening) and affection are key ingredients of successful romantic relationships. Deal with disagreements, not by suppressing them or seeking conflict, but like a dance: learning by doing, missteps are part of it, improvise, be flexible, and go with it. See the opportunity beneath the disagreement: to revitalize a relationship by seeing the important truths they reveal.
A question to be more mindful, curious, and helping correct biases: What is here that I have never noticed before?
Our time at home affects work and vice versa. In both cases, relationships are the foundation of how we feel. It helps to take some time after work, before getting home, to be aware of any feelings from the work day that may negatively affect you and others when at home.
We conducted personal interviews with Harvard Study participants every ten to twenty years. That seems like a long time, but whenever we requested a new interview, participants often said something like, Has it been that long already? It seemed to them that a decade had passed in the blink of an eye.“
p. 248
Relationships should be a subject at school. In fact, social and emotional learning is being taught at school and is showing promising results.
How do you move further along on your own path toward a good life? First, by recognizing that the good life is not a destination. It is the path itself, and the people who are walking it with you. As you walk, second by second you can decide to whom and to what you give your attention. Week by week you can prioritize your relationships and choose to be with the people who matter. Year by year you can find purpose and meaning through the lives that you enrich and the relationships that you cultivate. By developing your curiosity and reaching out to others - family, loved ones, coworkers, friends, acquaintances, even strangers - with one thoughtful question at a time, one moment of devoted, authentic attention at a time, you strengthen the foundation of a good life.“ p. 281